Google sued over fatal Google Maps error after man drove off broken bridge

Technology@kbin.social – 0 points – 10 months ago

Google allegedly gave drivers bridge route for years despite correction requests.

How does this can happen?

As a driver if google tells me I should cross a bridge, but there is no bridge I look for a different route. I don't try to cross the nonexistent birdge, that's insane

You ever see that episode of The Office (US) where Michael drives into a lake because his GPS told him to? It sounds pretty ridiculous, but I have no doubt there's people who put too much faith in their maps

From the article, it sounds like it was too dark to see the bridge was out, but then again you shouldn't be driving where you can't see either

On Lake Livingston in Texas when I was a kid there was one of the roads that went through the valley before it was a lake and was still there. Jsut went straight into the lake. Centerline was still painted on it. It was being used as a boat rampbut I was always surprised I never heard about anyone driving straight into the lake there. At theat time the GPS did show it still as a road straight through the lake which is weird because the lake was made well before GPS existed.

Looks like now they added some artificial land and made a proper boat ramp. I think it was old 190, apparently if you have sonar you can follow the road to the old path of the river and find the old truss bridge still under there.

Man people are judgy as hell. I like to think that I'd notice and stop too, but at 11pm, tired in the middle of nowhere with no street lights? How many of us know 100% that we would have stopped in time? It's understandable how this happened.

After an entire decade of directing people to drive off a goddamn bridge, Google should apologize to the family and settle. It's shameful. Get a better update team if you're going to provide a mapping service.

It doesn't matter. It should be literally impossible for a map to have any liability under any circumstances.

If the bridge wasn't labeled and blocked properly, all the liability is on the people responsible for it.

I agreed that the bridge owners should be the most responsible. But this bridge has been down for a decade, and with many reports to Google to change the path. The neglect at that side is definitely part of the issue

It's a map. It's strictly informational.

There's literally nothing they could do that would make a single penny of liability valid or acceptable.

I get it's informational. Its mentioned the bridge has been down for a decade and has been reported to Google multiple times. That at the very least should be something. You can argue this mans death isn't because of maps directly but it's hard to ignore the facts that this has been reported to Google multiple times.

No, it shouldn't. It literally does not matter in any way.

It is unconditionally impossible for there to be forgivable reason to attach liability to any good faith attempt to share information in any context. Applying liability to a map is fucking disgusting in every possible scenario.

And Google would fucking love a ruling against them. It's regulatory capture that makes it impossible for any competition to be developed because of the insurmountable barrier to entry such an abhorrent ruling would provide.

Is it still a "good faith attempt to share information" when they've ignored reports that their information is incorrect for literally a decade? If this was medical advice, would you still be saying that the provider of decade old misinformation not be at fault?

Why is it ok for a provider to knowingly give bad instructions, instructions that they have very good reason to know is incorrect, that leads to someone's death? At what point does it become clear neglegencenon the provider of said instructions?

I'm not saying Google is 100% at fault for the death, as the local municipalities owe a lions share of the blame for not properly marking the danger in a way that could have saved this person's life. But washing googles hands of blame when they couldn't be bothered to update their routes after a fucking decade is unconcionable.

Unconditionally yes.

Acting on reports can never under any circumstance be a prerequisite to providing information. If every single report they'd ever received was about this one place being incorrect, they had a human review them, and didn't change it, it would not even be theoretically possible for it to constitute negligence.

Negligence is failing to meet some obligation, and their obligation can never not be actually zero.